I wonder if there is a way to salvage the microphones from the isight as well. Author hasn't lost a word about it so I guess it has been discarded.

I still have a knock-off iSight from eBay which was quite similar but of course had worse image and production quality. One advantage is that it features a thread on the bottom so it can be mounted to a small tripod which still looks quite nice. I use it for a time-lapse project that records the growth of a plant by taking a photograph every 15 minutes. The image resolution is a lot better than the video resolution on these things but still years behind the pi camera I guess.